Features

Sponsored by Fair Isaac
http://mill.ucsd.edu

UC San Diego and Fair Isaac are pleased to announce the Fifth Annual University of California San Diego (UCSD) Data Mining Contest. The contest consists of two classification tasks based on data from a physics experiment.

Contest Tasks
The contest consists of two distinct but related tasks. In each task, contestants are given the results of a series of experiments, classified by whether they exhibit the phenomenon of interest. The goal is to build a classifier that will determine whether subsequent experiments exhibit the phenomenon. You may compete in one or both of the tasks.

Task 1 (fully-labelled, supervised): This is a standard supervised binary classification task, with a test set of examples consisting of both positively- and negatively-labelled examples. Performance on this task is evaluated by classification accuracy on the test set.

Task 2 (positive-only, semi-supervised): This is also a binary classification task, but only a few of the examples in the test set are labelled (all positive). The unlabelled examples are both positive and negative. Performance on this task is evaluated by F1 score on the test set.

Rules
Contestants can enter the contest alone, or as a team of up to four people. Contestants may be located anywhere in the world, and there are no citizenship restrictions. All current full-time undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers studying full-time are eligible to compete. However, due to the academic nature of the competition, anyone working for a company is prohibited from competing. Teams fall into two categories; teams composed strictly of undergraduates compete in the undergraduate division, and all other teams compete in the graduate division.

Once a day, teams may estimate their performance by submitting their predictions on a quiz set that is of similar construction to the test set. The scores on this set are displayed on the contest leaderboard.

Prizes

$8000 in prizes will be awarded based on task and division ($2000 per task per division):

First Place $1000
Second Place $600
Third Place $400

Undergraduate and graduate teams will be judged separately. Performance on the two tasks will also be judged separately.

Schedule:
Contest Begins: March 25, 2008

Final Submissions Due: June 15, 2008.